The New Golden Age

 

The Teenager needs a passport application form.

“I’ll get it for you,” I say.

I already know that my local post office doesn’t stock such forms for some strange mysterious reason and that I will need to go to the town centre. Still the weather is fine. I can walk there. The exercise will do me good.

The town centre post office has been renovated. The last time I was here I had to queue outside, but today I’m able to walk straight in. Most of what was once the post office is now a shop with aisles of food and drink. I join the post office queue which is long and snakes around.

I’m impressed that the glass screens have gone. It makes me feel that the world has become a safer place; that a perceived threat of danger no longer exists and that we can all breathe a little easier and once more relax.

Even the voice telling us which counter to go to is kinder almost soporific.

There are mostly African faces at the counters. All women, and I wonder if they’ve been chosen for their warm open faces and friendly smiles. The people in the queue don’t look anything like them. There are pinched faces and tired expressions and weary faces, but I guess once they’ve been served by such assistants that they too will thaw a little.

I wonder if this is a government plan, part of the ‘Big Society’ to make us all happier, more relaxed and content by removing the screens. I wonder if such barriers that once deemed all customers to be potential criminals and thugs will be similarly removed in train stations and banks. Perhaps this is the beginning of a new golden age, I muse.

When it’s my turn I go as directed to counter 3. The woman there has a moon shaped face which is lit with the broadest smile. I smile back and ask for a passport form.

“We don’t have any.”

It seems the main post office for the town has run out.

I don’t make any fuss, but the smiling counter woman must have secretly pressed an alarm button for suddenly another woman is with her.

I ask them if they know if any other local post offices have them.

The smiling woman rattles off a list, spraying me with her machinegun words.

I ask if she can write some down for me as otherwise I will forget. I am already imagining that others will have already have depleted such stocks, and I’m now on a mission to find the last passport application form left in the county.

Reluctantly, after a quick look back at the other woman as if I’ve just asked for classified information, she writes down three and gives me the list.

I leave.

After a three mile walk for no purpose, I know without glancing in any mirror that my face is pinched and that my expression is anything but sunny.

Chain Reaction

 

I just need bread and yoghurt so I pop into Morrisons.

They have red pepper and mozzarella piazza, on special offer. So I take one, then two, then three. I can freeze them and use them later with soup.

Soup!

Before too long I’m buying soup, and so it goes on a chain reaction of purchases that once started is unstoppable until my basket will hold no more and my arm aches.

Soon I’m at the self-service check out till with the bread and yoghurt buried in a basket I can only just heave up the scale.

The assistant readies a bag for me.

I begin.

But this self-service check out I’m at isn’t working properly and needs the assistant to hold her plastic key fob against its metal heart.

“Oh dear doesn’t it like me?” I ask.

“It doesn’t like anyone,” she says.

I’m halfway through when I realise that I don’t have my debit card. My trousers have no pockets so there’s no money either.

I tell the assistant and rush out of the supermarket to the car park in the hope that it is there.

It isn’t. I’ve lost it.

I think back to what I really need: bread and yoghurt, and I root around in the car to find a few coins so that I can at least return home with what I went for.

Back in the supermarket I speak to the customer service lady behind the desk. I explain that I have dropped my credit card somewhere in the supermarket and then I ask if anyone has handed it in. She opens up her till. She has quite a collection: green ones, blue ones, red ones. I’m hopeful. She flicks through them like a dealer in Las Vegas, but mine isn’t there. I’m impressed that so many have been handed in and I’m guessing that mine has yet to turn up. I leave my name and telephone number and dash back to my till.

The assistant has kindly checked out the rest of my basket. My bags are waiting ready for me. Someone is trying to move onto the till. I apologise and explain that I haven’t quite finished and he backs off.

The assistant is on another self service machine which isn’t working properly; and then she comes over to me. She’s expecting me to be wielding my credit card, and manages to remain calm when I show her my handful of coins and say I can only take the bread and yoghurt.

The machine doesn’t like undoing everything one little bit.

I daren’t even glance at the queue that is building up, but I can feel its looming stillness.

Eventually, I am back to bread and yoghurt and my chain reaction bags are whisked away.

I attempt to scan these items through again and the machine goes wrong yet again scanning the bread twice.

“It’s because I’ve done this,” the assistant says, and takes away her key thing that she’d left magnetically attached against its heart.

I’m about to finish and pay when the lady next to me says, ‘Is this your credit card?’

She’s picked it up from the floor from just behind where I’d initially placed the basket.

I’m delighted. Her name is Sue. I thank her and explain to the weary assistant that I’d like to have all my bags back again.

She returns them and I have to scan everything once more. The machine of course still doesn’t work properly, and the assistant constantly has to step back to my machine to use her key fob.

Eventually though, I have the whole lot packed. I pay, and then thank one and all. I expect cheers as I leave, but there is only the reluctant sound of the next person shuffling forwards to chance their luck on the machine. As I leave, thinking of soup and red pepper and mozzarella piazza, I know without turning that that machine’s red beacon light will be already flashing red.

Truth upon Truth

 

My neighbour is on the phone. She can hear a didgeridoo.

“Come and hear it,” she says.

I go around. She takes me into her front room. I’ve never been invited into this room before and I’ve been her neighbour for thirty years.

“Stand here and listen,” she says.

I stand still like a chocolate soldier and listen.

“Kept me awake all last night. I even went next door and banged on their door,” she says.

I can hear nothing.

“Can you feel the vibration?”

I centre my thoughts around my socks, but can sense nothing.

She is becoming agitated.

“Can you still hear it?” I ask.

She is anxious and distressed.

I listen again.

There’s nothing.

But her room is closing in on me, the browns, the swirling patterns, the claustrophobia.

“Why not come next door,” I say. “Come and have crumpets, tea and some of Ivy’s homemade plum jam.”

She follows me, and I make hot tea and steaming crumpets and ladle Ivy’s jam on top.

Her eyes are bright. She is looking around for electrical gadgets that could be making a noise. She spots the modem and its flashing lights.

“I can hear that,” she says.

I go closer to it.

It’s silent. Not making a sound.

The teenager comes downstairs.

He can’t hear the modem either, nor feel any vibration from it.

I tell her stories to cheer her up.

I tell her how I often mishear things. How when listening to a story that was being read out recently I thought the narrator said, “…running an umpire” and how mystified I had written down the phrase. Listening to other words in about batting and innings and how later I said how much I’d liked the cricket analogy. “Cricket?” they’d exclaimed.

Puzzled I’d then read out the puzzling phrase.

“Not ‘umpire’, empire!” It was explained, to much hilarity.

Then I tell her how during the same night in a poem about war I’d heard the phrase, ‘Troop upon troop’ and later commented on how effective I thought this phrase was and how it pressed home the terror. And how again I was given a mystified look. And then the line was read aloud again, and it turned out to be ‘Truth upon truth.’

I tell these stories so she will know that my hearing is not top notch and that there may well be a didgeridoo playing somewhere in her house which is sometimes punctuated with a thump before it beginning all over again, but even if there was or even if Rolf Harris was in the hallway giving it his all that I would probably be the person who would hear it.

She leaves laughing.

And I’m left wondering as to what my neighbour is really hearing and why I couldn’t hear anything at all.

It’s that sort of grass!

 

My neighbour’s garden is mostly grass or mostly nettles but every year the grass is mown. We generally do it together as the first cut is so very exhausting.

I start at the bottom and meander through islands where tulips grow amongst wild geranium, buttercups and dandelions.

The buttercups put up the least resistance and fall in soft supplication as I mow over them, but they make me feel mean and cruel. The dandelions put up more of a fight, whilst the wild geranium create a summery stink as they are cut down to their stems. But the grass is savage. Every blade is a sword and it fights for its right to grow tall and reach for the sun. It side-steps, parries, ducks and thrusts; so I have to make first one cross and then another and another changing directions in order to spring my attack. It clusters in thick clumps and hides twigs amidst its centres with which it clubs my blades so I have to bring in a replacement. It is thick and damp and resistant.

My neighbour, who is in her seventies, limps off the battlefield field wounded. She can hardly breathe and needs her inhaler the other tactic the grass uses in its defence a secret gas attack.

We talk about the grass. It was stolen from the grass used to seed the nearby racecourse. Perhaps not stolen, but left over, so to speak. The sort of grass to endure the gallop of metalled hooves and to cushion them should they fall. The sort of grass over which  hanged criminals  on the gibbet there once dangled their legs. It’s that sort of grass!

I leave a tuft for her to finish, like leaving a child the last piece in a jigsaw and she does so with a glorious flourish.

A small blue butterfly flying low is our reward.

Perhaps Bites?

 

The sun is shining.

I was in the garden most of yesterday, and today I've developed an alarming rash (perhaps bites) on arms, neck and torso.

Could it be an allergy to tulips? A reaction to geraniums? A vulnerability to violas? Or was it from leaning over into the pond to kiss the golden-eyed, bug-eyed frogs whose lips were cold and slimed with blanket weed and which then changed into princes at the touch? Golden-eyed, bug-eyed princes. Seven of them! With soft white throats that croaked.

Also, yesterday I bought a chair to replace the one that was broken. I'm trying to move back downstairs now that it is warmer and there's less risk of frost bite. It's supposed to be my new writing chair which I've set before the desk.

However, as it swings so slowly, I lean back, and oh it's so comforting, like being held, and I soon close my eyes and float away. It could easily become my sleeping chair!

Must put the seven princes on the Grand National today,

Yesterday I ate a Crunchie!

Happiness!

Deliciously Ridiculous

 

This is not my work

This is not my work

It is stolen

Stolen

Let me begin…

 

My auntie has two cats

My disembodied face looks down from the sky and weeps,

Gillyflowers and sops-in-wine

My sister always checks her shoes for earwigs

Every morning

When we are little.

 

One Halloween evening,

My friend bursts into tears

Because there was a toad in her wellington boot,

Which she'd left outside my house.

She thought I'd put it there –

I didn't,

But only because I didn't have a toad to hand.

 

It’s me, it’s me! I want some tea!

Roll back the hearthrug!

Someone is trying to get in.

Who's that in your wellington?

Bluebottle lives!

And Nigel is not dead.

 

I am up,

I am down,

Deep in the vortex

That accounted for the last Dodo.

Icky tack dock.

 

Importunate publishers

Peruse purple prose,

Pretending prescience.

To what avail?

To tell the tale of life and death,

In Ebbw Vale.

Jewels and binoculars hang

From the head of the mule,

Indeed.

 

The preacher, his hands in back pockets

"Repent, Harlequin!" says the Ticktockman

Clocks tick,

Empires rise and fall,

Fidelity remains,

At most, questionable.

 

And when the tray is silver

And the butler wears gloves

What does it matter?

If the railway is golden?

For they are cup-cakes.

Raining on a skull.

In a leaky ark full of furtive halibut.

A hovercraft full of eels.

My Aunty has a cat.

Why do Anarchists use tea-bags?

Because proper tea is theft.

 

Revel in freedom!

I am not the vagrant!

Out in the cold

A Chinese takeaway for one.

Shot full of holes

A banana ice lolly in one hand

And a feather in the other

Oh Topper, Topper.

Little Frilly one.

 

The skies were not lit by moonlight

Stands he, or sits

Inwardness is indeed a gain

Good-night, sweet Fish

How do the little Angels rise?

As many red herrings

As swim in the wood!

 

She spoke of me, the guttersnipe, the common kid.

Join the Underwater Motorcycling Federation now!

We're benighted, here upon this bank and shoal of thyme

What rhymes within your face and pain?

What thing of beauty is a burning bird hide,

Beneath the limpid waters of the fishing lake?

 

A fig for the listeners.

Clapping with both hands

This thread is not Zen.

Indeed, it is the Finger not the Moon.

This is not a Fish

This is not three points.

Catpeed

 

Penguins assume nun-natures on a Tuesday

If it falls on a weak day

Before the sun reaches its zenith

 

Dirty habits.

Are they nuns?

The Penguins on Lakey Hill!

This sentence is in Latin,

Except for this clause

(Which is in Dutch),

While nobody is looking.

 

Soap on a rope

The shower of destiny.

A big she-bear

Living the timeless life.

Prayer and fasting.

A lowly amoeba

In the pot

A slipper in the bicycle stew.

Will come home to roost

If I am not mistook.

 

I think I am a carrot in the casserole of life.

A scaly, watered-down episode

When onions are rising in the East.

 

This not a chicken.

It’s not a message,

Ce n'est pas un poisson

All Washed Up

 

I so rarely go into the town centre, but I did today.

I sign the petition, I don’t stand to listen to the preacher with his, ‘So he died for us, right? The flash cards on his board. I hate the way he cheats those that listen of choice by his slick words, ‘Right?’ knowing that they are boxed in and can not say, ‘Wrong’ because he’s given them no choice.

The police are burly, not from good dinners, but are fat with stab vests and bright yellow jackets beneath black buckles and straps. And I wonder when they changed. The policemen in my childhood didn’t look so. It now looks a scary job to patrol the streets and when I look from them to the people the people look scary too.

There is a young boy being led away. He looks rough. His clothes greys and thin with hints of blue. And then, this is false memory now, a boy with a graze to his chin who looks as if he’s been in a fight. Was he the one being held by the two police as he were a trophy cup? Later I see that he is limping, but his face says that he can still only think of walking back in the direction of more even trouble like that.

Everyone is ugly.

They are squat or fat or flabby. They sit on rough seats on the main street their skin holding too much flesh; and they eat bread rolls too big for human mouths, but which might have made a nice lunch for a giant.

The library is perhaps the most frightening place.

I rarely go there.

There is someone who is not quite right somewhere telling his life story to the air. The book which was there when I went on line, is not there upon the shelves; and when I check the computer’s catalogue it seems it was never there.

The person behind the desk is harassed.

He dashes first this way and then that. Too quick. Too rushed. Overloaded with queries and the accusations of the malcontents. The library seems to have lost most of its books together with its peace and slow, slow ways. It is now too many things. And people are impatient. Impatient with computers. I am just about to use one when I’m turned away.

The librarian has to go here first to do this, and then rushes there to do that, and the people he is dealing with are becoming ruder and unkind. As the mad man who is not quite right recounts his life story as if we are all his counsellors. A man rips a child away from a computer and roughly dangles him by the arm. He does the same thing later dragging him away from a keyboard and screen. The librarian who is there laudably says there is no need to shout at him. But the man ignores him and later ignores the child, no more than four, who is soon back again touching the keyboard.

And I want to rescue all the children I see from their smoking pushchair moms and their rough, stupid dads, but I know I would already be too late. And I think we’ve bred an ugly generation of people with worse still to come. When I see them they seem ungovernable and unreachable worse than the Elizabethan crowds that gaped at Tyburn.

There is no library card in the books any more, and of course when I try to use the machine to check out a book, it just does not work. And someone has to show me that first it’s this bar code and then it is that bar code. And I miss the person who once stamped the books and slipped the cards.

It’s all too busy and too stressed. It’s going to get worse I’m told. And even in the street I hear people talking about the cuts.

I buy a melon, bananas, avocado, strawberries and then find the music shop to buy an electric top E guitar string.

There is such peace in the music shop. Such quietude. It is an oasis. I tell him so, but he doesn’t seem to understand that beyond his door the world has become crazier and mad.

That there is a tide of people who will only wash up against his door.